Wearable electronic devices, or as used herein, wearable technology is a new class of electronic systems that can provide data acquisition through a variety of unobtrusive sensors that may be worn by a user. The sensors gather information, for example, about the environment, the user's activity, or the user's health status. However, there are significant challenges related to the coordination, computation, communication, privacy, security, and presentation of the collected data. Additionally, there are challenges related to power management given the current state of battery technology. Furthermore, analysis of the data is needed to make the data gathered by the sensors useful and relevant to end-users. In some cases, additional sources of information may be used to supplement the data gathered by the sensors. The many challenges that wearable technology presents require new designs in hardware and software.
Wearable technology may include any type of mobile electronic device that can be worn on the body, that is attached to or embedded in clothes, and various other accessories of an individual. This wearable technology currently exists in the consumer marketplace. Processors and sensors associated with the wearable technology can display, process, and/or gather information. Such wearable technology has been used in a variety of areas, including monitoring health of the user as well as collecting other types of data and statistics. These types of devices may be readily available to the public and may be easily purchased by consumers. Examples of some wearable technology in the health arena include FitBit®, Nike+ FuelBand®, and the Apple Watch®.
Currently available wearable devices are known to have issues with respect to power consumption and battery life. In that regard, past solutions have involved allowing the user tools for monitoring battery status and predicting when an electronic device may lose power. Further, some presently available devices provide power management alerts and options of when to charge device based on battery usage and power usage of certain functions (e.g., that may be particularly power-intensive). However, these existing solutions are ineffective.
Accordingly, there is a continued need in the art for wearable device solutions that provide charging information to a user of the wearable device in order to facilitate charging and the scheduling of charging.